Stories

Trapped in Gangland

Number

28024

Subject

Gangs

Source

ProPublica

State

Year

2018

Publication Date

Summary

The Central American gang MS-13 accounts for 1 percent of U.S. gang murders. But when Donald Trump became president, he seized on the gang’s violence on Long Island to promote tougher immigration policies. This series, co-published with New York magazine, Newsday, The New York Times Magazine and This American Life, showed how Trump’s bungled crackdown on MS-13 burned informants, deported young immigrants suspected of gang involvement on flimsy evidence, and failed to prevent further murders. Based on a year and a half of difficult and dangerous reporting, ProPublica reporter Hannah Dreier’s stories persuasively depicted how an entire subculture of Latino teenagers came to be trapped between the gang and the government.